10 Saturday Jan 2015
Posted in Accommodations
Portland at Seven
Martizay at Seven
I stand on the balcony in the dark and listen: A rooster crows. Faintly, church bells. Other than that, nothing. Nothing at all. It’s as dark as despair, as still as a trance. If the moon made sounds I’d hear that too. It’s waning, only a few days distant from full, and the trees cast moonshadow.
This is morning in Martizay. My breaths on the balcony are the first breaths of the day.
07 Wednesday Jan 2015
Posted in Accommodations, Travel
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We are in our very French kitchen, having breakfast after a whirlwind orientation from the delightful John and Jackie Fisher, our British hosts who are bravely entrusting their house and critters to us.
05 Monday Jan 2015
Posted in Accommodations
We have arrived in the tiny town of Martizay, France. It’s a whirlwind of activity here, both for our hosts Jackie and John—who are preparing to depart tomorrow morning for the UK where they will stay until late March—and for us, as we unpack our bags, shed clothes we have been wearing for four days, and learn all there is to keep up the farm while it’s under our stewardship.
03 Saturday Jan 2015
Posted in Accommodations
We made it! As far as Paris, anyway. After ten hours en route, one of them racing through the Amsterdam airport, we found ourselves checking in at the Hotel Paris-France, which looks really good from the outside, and has an easy name to remember to tell the taxi driver should there be too much absinthe.
24 Wednesday Dec 2014
Posted in Accommodations
Is she shy? Louise?
No. Not Louise. If a male rhino were charging her, she’d smile and ask him if he would like to sit down and talk about it. Definitely not shy.
She’s also an indefatigable shopper, a lover of all things French, and an unrestrained Parisian fangirl. So why hasn’t she written a post about our stay there? We’ll be there in a week, after all.
05 Friday Dec 2014
Posted in Accommodations
1908 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost Shooting Brake
“We have a thirteen-year-old Peugeot shooting brake, which you’re welcome to use.” That was John, of Jackie and John, the people in France with the homestead we’re looking after starting next month.
I didn’t want to appear too dense (especially when the man was offering the use of what seemed to be his car), so I responded, “That’s great! We’ll take good care of it!”
Whatever it is.
23 Sunday Nov 2014
Posted in Accommodations
Wait’ll you hear this one. You know that Tom and I have been lucky in our nomading about. We do a lot of advanced planning, true, but people who travel are always subject to surprises. Some of us love that! Saner people understand that it’s a wacky way to live and prefer to stay home.
20 Wednesday Aug 2014
Posted in Accommodations, Gallery, Travel
“Here’s your Loonie, and here’s your Toonie,” Keith said, by way of greeting at the Vancouver train station, plopping coins into our hands. (A loonie is worth one dollar Canadian—it has a carving of a common loon on it—and a toonie is worth two.) He was providing us with a small budget for our weekend in Vancouver, British Columbia. (Yes, the travel bug has hit again!)
15 Tuesday Jul 2014
Posted in Accommodations
Louise’s closet. Miraculously, she was able to accomplish this in eight weeks.
Back when we sold it all two years ago, we wrote about how relieved we were to be free of clutter. Why did we need all those office supplies, hair products, cookbooks, shoes, kitchen gadgets, CDs and fabric scraps? How do such collections happen? Here’s how:
13 Tuesday May 2014
Posted in Accommodations, Gallery
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Living room and guard sheep
A bed. Two bedside tables. A pot rack. Two dressers (man am I sick of making drawers!). A dining-room table. Four chairs for the dining-room table. Two stools for the kitchen counter. A metal rack that we call “the appliance garage.” A monolithic wardrobe. Two office chairs. Two office desks (and more chairs—man am I sick of assembling chairs). A TV stand and a tall shelf. Six lamps and a convertible couch.
That’s what we built during the past two weeks. Yesterday the living-room furniture arrived. Blissfully, it was assembled. (That’s it above.)
The Expat Almanac 